Kevin Kohls

President, Kohls Consulting

In 1989, Kevin Kohls developed General Motor’s Throughput Improvement Process (TIP), a process that has been generating results for GM for nearly 30 years. The TIP process was one of the key factors that led to GM being presented with the Franz Edelman INFORMS award in 2005. Kevin is also the recipient of the Boss Kettering Award for Innovation and GM Research’s Most Valuable Colleague Award. Kevin continues to provide systematic continuous improvement methods and tools through his consultancy, Kohls Consulting. He is a certified demand driven planner and Jonah. In 2017, Kevin published “Addicted to Hopium,” a business novel now available on Amazon.

Workshops

30 Years of Success: TOC and Throughput Improvement at General Motors. In 1987, GM’s new Detroit Hamtramck assembly plant was struggling to make its demand numbers. Working with GM Research, plant controls engineers developed the Throughput Improvement Process (TIP) which focused resources and improvements on the bottleneck. Throughput improved with each iteration of the TIP process and it wasn’t long before the Hamtramck plant went from the worst plant in the corporation to the best. GM has seen a torrent of changes in 30 years, but TIP continues to run. Today, every GM plant has a throughput improvement engineer, every machine collects data from the day it’s turned on, and every design change to the plant must go through the simulation process based on TOC. As GM moves toward an industry 4.0 transformation, the future includes more advanced throughput analytics that will build on and enhance the TIP track record of success.

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